GAO Reports & Testimonies

active ●Ingestion health: delivering Legislative · Tier 1 · RSS feed · Government Accountability Office

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What this source is

The Government Accountability Office is Congress's audit and oversight arm. This RSS feed carries its reports and testimonies — program audits, evaluations, and legal decisions — with long report-summary descriptions (25 recent items, ~4,000 characters each; report pages extract at ~9,000 characters).

Identity and registry record

Registry id

gao-reports

Agency / parent organization

Government Accountability Office

Branch

legislative

Type

RSS feed

Status

active

Tier

1

URL (feed)

https://www.gao.gov/rss/reports.xml (opens in a new tab)

URL (home)

https://www.gao.gov/reports-testimonies (opens in a new tab)

Registered

2026-07-26

Registry notes

Probed 2026-07-26: RSS verified end-to-end — 25 items, avg description 4083 chars, sample article extracted (8987 chars text). robots.txt sets Crawl-delay: 420 in its User-agent: * block — the server's stated limit for all crawlers, honored without exception; that prices each article fetch at 7 minutes of wall clock. Posture decision 2026-07-28: feed-only (adapter rss-feed-only) — the ~4,000-char descriptions are GAO's own report summaries and carry the digest-relevant substance; the article page (~9,000 chars) adds mostly site furniture. Fewer requests, not faster ones. 16 bootstrap items ingested as full before the switch; later items are feed-only — both modes disclosed per item. Revisit if a report's summary proves insufficient (targeted single fetches remain possible within the delay).

How we ingest it

Channel

RSS feed

Method

RSS poll via AgencyClient, feed metadata only (crawl-delay economics; see notes).

Adapter

rss-feed-only

Poll cadence

about every 60 minutes while the collector runs

Request budget

the agency class: at most 1,500 requests per day shared across every agency web source, counted from the fetch log (failed requests count too)

Politeness

robots.txt is honored as observed — including each host's crawl-delay, exactly — and every request identifies itself as fapd/0.1 (Free Agentic Publication Digester; +https://fapd.info/bot.html; contact: hustleyourcity@gmail.com); a refusal is recorded, never evaded

Capture and hash

captured raw content is hashed (SHA-256) into the day's committed provenance manifest, hash-chained day to day (PROVENANCE.md)

Ingestion health

●Ingestion health: delivering 39 item(s) in the last 14 days; most recent 2026-08-03; 0 of 205 request(s) to www.gao.gov returned no content.

This label has held since 2026-08-03T18:46:01Z (UTC) and was last re-checked 2026-08-03T19:51:47Z (UTC).

Counts are of our own requests, retries included. A 4xx or 5xx is the server declining to return content — that may be load, maintenance, on-demand generation, or a limit the publisher sets, and we cannot tell which from outside. Nothing here is a measurement of the publisher.

Ingestion statistics

These figures describe this project's ingestion of this source — items we recorded and requests we made — and nothing else. They are not a measurement of the publisher.

Last 24 hours

Last 14 days

All time

Last 30 days, day by day